Where were all the bugs? After one of the wettest winters ever, the deserts in California and Arizona have bloomed, and that in turn has produced an insect population explosion. Long-haul semis have been coming off I-10 into L.A. with their grilles creamed over with dead aphids, grasshoppers, and butterflies. When Bill Wiemann let us ride along as he drove the world's most valuable musclecar 400 miles back from April's Mopar Spring Fling show in Van Nuys to his house in Phoenix, we figured several thousand juicy flying pests would experience glorious deaths against the '71 Hemi 'Cuda convertible's segmented grille. At least we'd get a cool, if gruesome, photo out of it. But our strike count was modest.

Maybe even the insects were scared about damaging a car that's worth, according to its owner, at least $5 million. It's a mind-boggling number even for an economics professor to wrap his mind around, much less an arthropod. But Wiemann says he's turned down offers for that much, and he expects the offers to only grow as more and more enthusiasts chase these rarest musclecars that are coming on the market less and less often. After all, there were supposedly only 11 genuine '71 Plymouth 'Cuda convertibles made with the 426ci Hemi under their hoods. There a lot more than 11 people who want one today, and some of those people have a lot of money.

2/13Oil should feel privileged to be in this engine. Of course when you're on the road in a 34 year-old car, you never take anything for granted.

How did we get to the point where cars that sold for less than $6,000 when they were new--and were even then considered expensive--now command prices nearly 1,000 times that? Who's buying musclecars at these prices? And what does it mean for those of us who aspire to own even the more common muscle machinery? That's why HOT ROD hooked up with Bill Wiemann.

Wiemann's 'Cuda is no secret in the Mopar world. At the Spring Fling it sat under a tree apart from the other cars on display like royalty amid the masses. "That's it," said one attendee to me, unsolicited and sensing that the total stranger next to him had to share at least some of his awe. "That's the $2 million 'Cuda. The world's most expensive musclecar." He didn't comment on how the guy who owned it was sitting next to the car in a folding chair, smoking Marlboros, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt illustrated with Mopars, and doing an impressive job of blending in. And what he likely didn't know was that Wiemann had already sold his other '71 Hemi 'Cuda ragtop--a blue one--for $3 million, dropping the white one to number two on the list of muscle-machine selling prices (that anyone has allowed the public to know about anyway).

3/13'69 Coronet R/T convertible s<br>It's believed that only nine Hemi Coronet convertibles were made for the '69 model year. This one is loaded with options and is one of only maybe two with a four-speed.

Wiemann's white 'Cuda started its life with a boat trip to France where it's believed to have been sold through a Simca dealer to someone living in the town of Mulhouse (at that time Simca was owned by Chrysler). While it was rumored that that someone was novelist, playwright and screenwriter Franoise Sagan, that has recently come into doubt. What's certain is that after going through several owners it wound up at Roger Gibson Restorations in Richmond, Virginia, where Wiemann finally saw it.

Since the car was at Gibson's shop on a two-year bond to undergo restoration, it took some finagling and financial lubrication to keep the car in the U.S. rather than shipping it back to Europe (only to reimport again). But Wiemann figured all the angles, paid all the tariffs and fees, and when the car was done at Gibson's it was registered in Wiemann's home state of North Dakota and found a spot in his winter home's garage in Phoenix.

4/13Every car except the Charger Daytona in this photo has a Hemi under its hood. Wiemann recently sold the blue '71 'Cuda for $3 million. The heavily optioned, four-speed, green Challenger convertible is one of nine. This happens every day at his house.

This is likely the last of the Hemi 'Cuda convertibles produced, and one of only two that wears the large billboard side graphics. It's a strangely optioned car with leather upholstery but without a power-operated top and with those loud graphics but a TorqueFlite three-speed automatic and a mild 3.23:1 final drive gearset. Since the car was sent to France, it's not surprising that the speedometer and odometer are calibrated in kilometers, or that the American-spec radio was deleted. What's surprising is that there has ever been anyone in France who'd want a Hemi 'Cuda.

Roger Gibson's reputation is for precise restorations that recreate how cars looked and ran when they left the factory, and Wiemann's 'Cuda is no exception. He started with a solid car that only showed about 12,000 kilometers (about 7,400 miles) on its clock and had no rust. Anything that had to be replaced on the car during the restoration was replaced with new old stock (N.O.S.) parts accumulated by Gibson and Wiemann over the decades. That includes a $4,300 rim-blow steering wheel. The billboard graphics are reproductions for no other reason than polyvinyl stickers won't survive 34 years and still stick to a car. The 'Cuda looks like a new car, not a perfect one--the trunk lid's shut lines may be uneven, but that's the way Chrysler made them.

5/13Every car except the Charger Daytona in this photo has a Hemi under its hood. Wiemann recently sold the blue '71 'Cuda for $3 million. The heavily optioned, four-speed, green Challenger convertible is one of nine. This happens every day at his house.

Leaving Van Nuys for our drive to Phoenix was a total non-event. Wiemann simply loaded the luggage from his hotel into the trunk and we headed to the freeway; there were no special rituals to start the car, our butts hit seats unprotected by covers, and we didn't have to take off our shoes to get inside. We'd caravan with photographer Randy Lorentzen's van and Greg Nelson driving Wiemann's new white Dodge Ram that wears billboard Hemi graphics similar to the 'Cuda's. Behind the Ram was a '70 'Cuda hardtop with a non-original 440 under its hood that Nelson had picked up at the Spring Fling for $17,000.

The 'Cuda didn't buck, barf, heave, or stumble in city street traffic, and as we approached the 101 freeway, a guy in a Camry pulled alongside. "What a beautiful car!" he shouted. "What's it worth? Like 40 grand?" Hey, if he'd known any better he wouldn't have been driving a Camry.

At 43, Wiemann is young for a muscle collector. He's old enough to remember the cars while growing up in Verona, North Dakota, but by the time he got his driver's license the era was over and the cars already relics. "My brothers and I had Mopars when we were growing up," he says. He wound up studying aeronautics in college and becoming a pilot for UPS while accumulating a cache of about a dozen Mopar musclecars along the way. But by the early '90s he was sick of living paycheck to paycheck and decided to sell his collection of Hemis and 440s to go into business for himself.

"I netted about $230,000," he says, "and it hurt. But the investment in land and my building business paid off. You pay the price and then you reap the reward."

6/13Would you drive a priceless car across 400 miles of desert?

Wiemann made his money in both the steel building business and shrewd and common-sense investing in Fargo-area real estate. "A lot of the land I bought was dry land when Fargo was flooded in 1997," he explains, "and that's when it really hit." He's expanded his land investments into the Phoenix area since then, and Phoenix has been the fastest growing city in America. There's nothing magical in how Wiemann acquired his wealth--and he emphasizes that it's hardly unlimited--but he's spent it on many magical things.

Besides his current stash of rare muscle, he had a brush with death in an alcohol Hemi dragster and performed aerobatics in his own P-51 Mustang. He's not married, he doesn't have any kids (thought he's close to his fianc Diane's sons) and he likes to share his toys with his friends.

Eastbound on the I-10, it was obvious Wiemann's 'Cuda is about as sweet as an E-body Plymouth can be. It doesn't squeak, it doesn't rattle, and it's actually pretty quiet. The tall gear lets the engine just sort of lope along at freeway speeds, and it even rides well. We weren't chasing Porsches through the mountains or diving into the Corkscrew at Laguna Seca, so the 'Cuda's nose-heavy weight bias, adequate-at-best brakes, old-school suspension, and bias-ply tires didn't make much difference. And there's still nothing like firewalling an old Hemi's accelerator, feeling the transmission knock down a gear, hearing those secondaries open, and then spitting a cloud of digested hydrocarbons out the dual exhausts.

But that glory comes at the price of stupendously bad fuel mileage. To cover the 400 miles we had to stop for fuel twice and were approaching vapors pulling into Wiemann's home. Single-digit fuel economy helped kill the muscle era back when gas approached 25 per gallon, and at $2.70 it's even more painful. Would fuel economy keep us from hocking a lung in order to own a Hemi? Hell, no. But we'd quickly run out of body parts keeping go-juice pumping into this car's dual AFBs.

8/13'69 Hemi Superbird t<br>This is one of the few cars Wiemann bought at Barrett-Jackson. Tuned to cruise, it has tall gears, a TorqueFlite, and BFG Radial T/As.

Other than the fact that it was made in a car so rare and precious, the trip to Phoenix was uneventful, easy, and shockingly comfortable. The big event came in arriving at Wiemann's home and, more importantly, the garage that sits behind it.

Covering only about 4,400 square feet of floor space, Wiemann's garage sits just behind his swimming pool with a set of glass doors positioned so that at least one car is always perfectly framed and visible from his bedroom. That way when he rolls over in bed, what he sees is guaranteed to be pleasant--as long as a coyote isn't munching on a cat next to the pool.When we visited, the

9/13Surgeons' hands are dirtier than Wiemann's tie-rod ends.

When we visited, the garage held, naturally, the white 'Cuda convertible we drove in on, one of the nine '70 Hemi Challenger convertible four-speeds ever built, one of two '70 Hemi Coronet convertibles, a '69 Hemi Coronet convertible, a '68 Hemi GTX convertible, the blue '71 Hemi 'Cuda convertible with only 236 original miles that Wiemann had just sold for $3 million, a '70 Chevelle SS LS6 convertible, a Panther Pink '70 Challenger T/A, a '71 Ram Air GTO Judge convertible, a yellow '70 Hemi Charger, a '69 Charger Daytona with a 440 and four-speed, a bright yellow '70 Hemi Superbird, and a '69 Z/28 with cross-ram carbs. "Most of the cars I get are already restored," says Wiemann, "but they don't drive well. I like to tweak them to get them running as good as they look." He's bought cars like his LS6 at the Barrett-Jackson auction, but for the most part he has to discover the cars on his own, and most megadollar musclecar transactions are never publicly revealed.

Wiemann's hands-on approach to his cars was apparent when he let us drive his Daytona and Superbird back-to-back. The Daytona was a fresh arrival that looked perfect but had a big deadspot in the center of its steering and the shifter operated by random heave--driving this car felt as if you just added a few points to your blood alcohol level. But the Superbird was taut, precise and a joy. It didn't steer or stop well, but no Superbird does. You could drive it to Florida that night. "I just want to be able to get into any car and drive it and not worry about it," he says.

10/13They don't like our food, they think our culture is crass, and they can't stand our foreign policy. So we took back the 'Cuda.

What's it like to drive cars that are worth more than a million? Once you realize it's impossible to do a million's worth of damage, it's sort of liberating. You can't possibly total the car.

Wiemann isn't a dilettante collector who puts his cars in plastic bubbles and never drives them. He's not a speculator looking to make his fortune by getting off the merry-go-round of spiraling musclecar prices just before the whole thing collapses. And it's astonishing to have someone throw you the keys to his million-dollar Mopar and tell you to take it for a drive. It's literally a dream come true.

11/13This is the '71 'Cuda that actually holds the record selling price for musclecars at $3,000,000.

But even though Wiemann is well positioned in this market and has profited in it (though coming nowhere near what he's spent), he knows that sooner or later the prices could exceed even his fiscal grasp. "I buy what I want," he says. As long as Wiemann is alive, there'll still be some original, numbers-matching, super-rare, irreplaceable musclecars being driven. But true enthusiasts like Wiemann who have the wherewithal to indulge their passion aren't easily replaced either.

Hemi 'Cuda hardtops are already cresting past $1 million, and even cars like the 'Cuda Nelson picked up at the Spring Fling are deep into five figures for their parts value if nothing else. When clapped-out 318 and six-cylinder Barracuda beaters are worth $10,000, it becomes less likely anyone will be cutting them up to create street machines or using them as daily drivers. They're all collectible now.

Musclecars have never been more expensive than they are today. Sure, the market has crashed before and it can crash again. If or when that happens, it may be possible to pick up a '71 Hemi 'Cuda convertible for less than a million again. For many collectors who paid more than that, that drop would be a fiscal disaster. But Bill Wiemann promises he'll only see it as a buying opportunity. HRM